Kevin Smith reveals details about Clerks 3 and it sounds all sorts of meta…

Following on from the news just last week that Kevin Smith was returning to the Quick Stop for the closing chapter in the Clerks trilogy (here), tonight we have an idea what the story will be and it sounds delightfully meta.

Now, Smith has had a Clerks sequel planned for a while and he even has a script written for a while… but after his near death experience a couple of years back, Smith had had a change of heart (pardon the pun) and has rewritten the script.

Speaking to The Wrap, Smith revealed that the movie will, much like the original Clerks, draw from Smith’s own life experience: “Randal has a heart attack, decides that he came so close to death, and his life has meant nothing, there’s nobody to memorialize him, he has no family or anything like that. And in the recovery, while under fentanyl, he comes to the conclusion at mid-life, having almost died, having worked in a movie store his whole life and watched other people’s movies, he tells Dante, I think we need to make a movie. So Dante and Randal make Clerks. That’s the story of Clerks 3.”

All very cathartic, really…

He goes on: “I’m going to bring my boys right back to where they brought me. I’m writing it, it writes itself because I f@#ing lived it 25 years ago. It’s just warm and f@#ing wonderful. They’re figuring it out the same way I figured it out, but I have the benefit of being able to cherry pick all my favorite stories and moments of making Clerks and putting it right back into their hands.”

Now, by putting it in their hands, apparently Smith will actually be letting stars Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson film scenes themselves, with word being that Clerks 3 will be in colour, but the footage they produce will be, yup, you guessed it, black and white.

So, this all sounds quite dark, but it seems that Smith’s original script was, well, darker: “That was a movie that was written by a guy who was obsessed with middle-aged and dying, and it was all about death. And that was before I almost died. Then I almost died, and now I don’t really want to talk about that s@#t. I’ve been too close. Now I just want to do life affirming things. The tone is going to shift completely. I owe those guys, those characters, Dante and Randal, a lot more than the kind of doom and gloom I was about to put them through. I loved that script, and I loved reading it, but there wasn’t a dry eye in the house for the last 15 pages.”

It sounds like Clerks III will be a real closing chapter to the story and, as much as we don’t want to see the end of Randal and Dante, it will be nice to see how the world turns our for them.

Thoughts?